{"id":9273,"date":"2014-05-23T18:30:44","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T18:30:44","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2021-05-28T16:15:07","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T20:15:07","slug":"the_meaning_of_memorial_day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2014\/05\/23\/the_meaning_of_memorial_day\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meaning of Memorial Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Ed, Winter Springs, Florida. You\u2019re next on Open Line Friday. Hi. Great to have you here.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Rush, thank you so much for having me on.<\/p>\n

RUSH: You bet.<\/p>\n


\nCALLER: This is gonna be a different kind of call because I called specifically to talk about something Congress did that I\u2019m proud of. I gotta reach way back, Rush, I gotta reach back 43 years, but in 1971 Congress passed legislation to make Memorial Day a national holiday. And, you know, June 6th, Rush, just two weeks from now —<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah.<\/p>\n

CALLER: — we\u2019ll be recognizing the 70th anniversary of D-Day. We had 400,000 American veterans lost in the war to end all wars, and I just think it\u2019s so important that we remember what we\u2019re recognizing this Monday on Memorial Day. It\u2019s not a barbecue day. It\u2019s not a big sale day. It\u2019s a day that we need to recognize and remember those veterans that fought for us and valiantly died so that folks like you, Rush, could exercise your First Amendment rights to free expression on the radio, because was it not for them, Rush, we\u2019d be living in a completely different country.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Well, there\u2019s no doubt about that. When you talk about this, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, there hasn\u2019t been anything like it since. So if you are 35, maybe even 40 years old or younger, it\u2019s nothing more than a moment in history to you, if you don\u2019t have any relatives who were old enough to have actually lived through it.<\/p>\n

My dad, all of my friends\u2019 parents fought in it or participated in some way; grandparents, too. So D-Day, World War II, Battle of the Bulge, those are all very real things. Hitler, all of that, was very real. It\u2019s just a historical moment now for young people, like the Depression was a historical moment for me. I\u2019ve gotta take a break, but I\u2019m gonna expand on this point here when we get back.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n


\nRUSH: When I was growing up — I was born in 1951, the great Depression was in 1929, 1930. I wasn\u2019t even a — well, wait a minute. I could have been a thought in my dad\u2019s mind. I don\u2019t know. But 1951, 1929, 1930, there was no way that I could experience it, obviously. But growing up, my dad and my grandfather, I mean, it was one of the most formative events in their lives. It was the primary reason that my father had as his single objective for me that I get a college degree, because if you did not have an education during the Great Depression you didn\u2019t have a prayer of getting a job, any job. And back then there wasn\u2019t welfare. You didn\u2019t eat if you didn\u2019t work. You didn\u2019t have a radio if you didn\u2019t work. You didn\u2019t have all the creature comforts that people that don\u2019t work today have. So it was a must.<\/p>\n

And the Great Depression also had, as another formative aspect, saving money. So growing up, I was inundated with, ?”What if there\u2019s another one? You must be prepared if there\u2019s another depression.?” It was something so bad, it was so intense, it shaped their lives to such a degree, that it was something they wanted to prepare their kids to be able to withstand and endure, were it to happen again. So we were constantly reminded how bad it was, in the midst of abundance and prosperity and expanding economic times, the fifties boom and everything post-World War II was booming. And even while that was going on, my brother and I were constantly warned that the bottom can fall out at any time like it had back then, so education and saving money, we were drilled with.<\/p>\n

In response, I said, “Dad, look, I\u2019m sure it was bad. But I didn\u2019t live it. All I can try to do is understand it. I can\u2019t relate to it.” It didn\u2019t work; he kept drilling it into me. Now, the point I\u2019m trying to make here, we got D-Day coming up. Do you know, folks, that on D-Day, D-Day alone, the D-Day operation, we lost more Americans, slightly more lives were lost in that operation than we lost on 9\/11, in just one day, one theater of battle in World War II. The Battle of the Bulge was deadly as well. But that, 70 years ago, when you try to talk to people that are teenagers, young adults today about it, it\u2019s like Depression was to me. It\u2019s something that happened way back then, but they can\u2019t imagine something like that happening. People alive today, they worry about nukes and stuff, but a giant world war is something that they can\u2019t relate to. It hasn\u2019t happened in their lifetimes.<\/p>\n

And this is why I think education\u2019s so important. I think education is so crucial. Pearl Harbor is hardly even mentioned anymore, December 7th, the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor. It comes and goes. It doesn\u2019t get much notice. Memorial Day, like the caller said, Memorial Day, the reason for it, fewer and fewer people know. It\u2019s just the first real weekend of summer, three-day weekend and so forth, barbecues, what have you. That\u2019s why I think education is important. I\u2019m really glad my dad drilled into me these things that he had lived through and it helped me relate to him better and understand the things he thought were important and why he was raising me the way he was.<\/p>\n

I have been to Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc<\/a>. I\u2019ve been to some of the places where D-Day happened, Normandy, the American cemetery there. I wasn\u2019t alive, but I was close enough to it. And when your parents lived through it and tell stories, or won\u2019t, as it turned out in my dad\u2019s case. He would not answer very many questions about it, it was that horrible. He was in the China-Burma theater, flew P-51s. But kids today — and it\u2019s no fault of theirs, it\u2019s not up to them to have the importance of it realized. It\u2019s up to us to transfer it to them.<\/p>\n


\nSo if you have somebody 30 years old listening to this program, this guy just calls, “You know, if it weren\u2019t for that, you wouldn\u2019t be free to speak. You might not have a radio show, or you might be speaking German.” They laugh at that. It?\u2019s just some old codger calling up with some old fears from the past. The country\u2019s changing, thank God we\u2019re not governed by people like that anymore. But that was his world, and that was the significance of it. And you go back through all of American history, the founding of this country is being treated that way now. The founding of this country is being treated as just an historical blip. In fact, worse. The founding of the country is being besmirched.<\/p>\n

In fact, my sharp memory just reminded me that I\u2019ve got something here in this Stack of Stuff about this. Obama was at a fundraiser — don\u2019t tell me I didn\u2019t print this out. We?\u2019re having printer troubles today. Okay, I\u2019m gonna have to go back and get it. Let me see if my memory can re-create this. Obama was at a fundraiser yesterday or sometime this week and he was complaining about the founding. And he was complaining that the Founding Fathers didn\u2019t know what they were doing when they apportioned every state with two senators. He said (paraphrasing), “We Democrats happen to live in big cities like New York and Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, and we don\u2019t have equal representation in the Senate.” He was complaining and whining and moaning about how unfair it is for modern-day Democrats the way the Senate was constituted. He didn\u2019t even bother to tell \u2019em that senators originally weren\u2019t even elected by the people. They were appointed.<\/p>\n

Two senators in each state was a compromise the founders had to make. In order to balance out the way the House of Representatives was put together was based on population. And states got the number of representatives they had based on the population of the state and where the population was, was where the districts were drawn and so forth. But the Senate didn\u2019t matter. You got two senators no matter what the population of the state was, no matter what the demographics, no matter what the makeup, no matter what the geographic location.<\/p>\n

Now, it was the Washington Times<\/a>. This is last night. ?”At a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago Thursday night, Mr. Obama told a small group of wealthy supporters that there are several hurdles to keeping Democrats in control of the Senate and recapturing the House. One of those problems, he said, is the apportionment of two Senate seats to each state regardless of population.?”<\/p>\n

He said, ?”Obviously, the nature of the Senate means that California has the same number of Senate seats as Wyoming. That puts us at a disadvantage.?” The way this all happened — I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll remember this from what you were taught in history. ?”The Founding Fathers decided in the ?\u2019Great Compromise?\u2019 in 1787 to apportion House seats based on population and give each state two seats in the Senate regardless of population. The solution was a compromise between large states and small states in a dispute that nearly dissolved the Constitutional Convention.?” And that was the compromise. And if that hadn\u2019t happened, who knows if we would even have a Constitution or a country.<\/p>\n

So you can say it about D-Day, World War II, World War I. The thing is, it all did happen. The founding of this country is being besmirched, it\u2019s being impugned. The Founding Fathers themselves are being excoriated as racist bigots and so forth. See, Obama was complaining about gridlock. And I happen to love gridlock. I think gridlock is the greatest thing the Founding Fathers invented when it comes to the legislative branch. You wouldn\u2019t believe how much gridlock has saved and slowed down the inexorable march of socialism in this country. We have gridlock to thank for it. And I\u2019m serious.<\/p>\n

Gridlock is when they don\u2019t get things done. We\u2019ve got enough laws. We have enough supervision. We have enough Nanny State behavior directed our way. We have enough of the best and brightest thinking we don\u2019t know how to live our own lives. Anything that stands in their way of creating more — the gridlock, by the way, there\u2019s a bad sign to it, too. All these agencies start just writing their own regulations anyway without legislation, like the EPA. But that takes me in a direction I\u2019ll get to at another time on another occasion.<\/p>\n

The point here is that World War II and D-Day particularly, these are crucially important events in American history and we\u2019re reaching a point in our evolution where more and more people are not gonna have — it\u2019s not knowledge of it, but any appreciation. That has to be taught. That has to be imparted.<\/p>\n


\nNow, when your parents live through something like that, it\u2019s easy for young people to grow up learning about it because parents impart it, teach it, inform. But when you\u2019re young and the people you know have no direct contact with something like that, then it requires a much more studious effort. And the effort, sadly, is not being taken. So we\u2019ve reached a point in our country\u2019s evolution where a lot of young people — stop and think. Somebody that\u2019s 18, 21 years old — throw away the first six or seven years. Let\u2019s say they start paying attention at age eight or nine. What is their experience? Their experience is Bush was rotten. Bush was Hitler. Iraq was wrong. America\u2019s military is a bunch of terrorists. The United States is destroying the planet with global warming and our advanced lifestyle and our SUVs. Major corporations are the scourge of the earth, killing their own customers, poisoning their own customers.<\/p>\n

I mean, it\u2019s just a litany, a never-ending litany of negative after negative after negative what a rotten place this country is. That\u2019s all they\u2019ve heard in the media that they\u2019ve had, in the education that they\u2019ve had. That\u2019s it. They don\u2019t know of an America victorious in war, beating back giant powers who had grand designs on dominating and destroying this country. They have no knowledge of that. They don\u2019t have the experience of living through it and feeling the triumph. This is one of the reasons why I\u2019ve written these books, by the way, for children, is to try get the truth of the founding. The Rush Revere Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans is just a little effort to have young people have some alternative view of the greatness, the uniqueness, the specialness of this country.<\/p>\n

Memorial Day is one of these days, it\u2019s been for a long time, people don\u2019t know what it really is all about, and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it. It\u2019s just part of natural human evolution. It takes effort, a concerted effort to teach people things that they can\u2019t relate to \u2019cause they weren\u2019t alive when they happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: Ed, Winter Springs, Florida. You\u2019re next on Open Line Friday. Hi. Great to have you here. CALLER: Rush, thank you so much for having me on. RUSH: You bet. CALLER: This is gonna be a different kind of call because I called specifically to talk about something Congress did that I\u2019m proud of. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Meaning of Memorial Day - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2014\/05\/23\/the_meaning_of_memorial_day\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"The Meaning of Memorial Day - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: Ed, Winter Springs, Florida. You\u2019re next on Open Line Friday. Hi. Great to have you here. CALLER: Rush, thank you so much for having me on. RUSH: You bet. 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